Related papers: LiMuon: Light and Fast Muon Optimizer for Large Mo…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel…
Orthogonal momentum gradient updates have emerged to overcome the limitations of vector-based optimizers like Adam. The vector-based optimizer Adam suffers from high memory costs and ill-conditioned momentum gradient updates. However,…
The Muon optimizer has recently attracted considerable attention for its strong empirical performance and use of orthogonalized updates on matrix-shaped parameters, yet its underlying mechanisms and relationship to adaptive optimizers such…
Memory-efficient optimization is critical for training increasingly large language models (LLMs). A popular strategy involves gradient low-rank projection, storing only the projected optimizer states, with GaLore being a representative…
We study the implicit bias of momentum-based optimizers on smooth homogeneous models. We show that \textit{momentum steepest descent} algorithms like Muon (spectral norm), MomentumGD ($\ell_2$ norm), and Signum ($\ell_\infty$ norm) are…
In the past year, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as visual question answering, visual understanding and reasoning. However, the extensive model size and high training and…
Matrix-based optimizers have demonstrated immense potential in training Large Language Models (LLMs), however, designing an ideal optimizer remains a formidable challenge. A superior optimizer must satisfy three core desiderata: efficiency,…
Training large-scale neural networks requires solving nonconvex optimization where the choice of optimizer fundamentally determines both convergence behavior and computational efficiency. While adaptive methods like Adam have long dominated…
We introduce Robust Multi-Objective Decoding (RMOD), a novel inference-time algorithm that robustly aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) to multiple human objectives (e.g., instruction-following, helpfulness, safety) by maximizing the…
The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for…
Monotonicity constraints are powerful regularizers in statistical modelling. They can support fairness in computer-aided decision making and increase plausibility in data-driven scientific models. The seminal min-max (MM) neural network…
Large-scale contrastive vision-language pre-trained models provide the zero-shot model achieving competitive performance across a range of image classification tasks without requiring training on downstream data. Recent works have confirmed…
Efficient stochastic optimization typically integrates an update direction that performs well in the deterministic regime with a mechanism adapting to stochastic perturbations. While Adam uses adaptive moment estimates to promote stability,…
Recently, multi-objective optimization (MOO) has gained attention for its broad applications in ML, operations research, and engineering. However, MOO algorithm design remains in its infancy and many existing MOO methods suffer from…
A central challenge in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks can substantially degrade performance on previously learned ones. Existing projection-based methods mitigate…
The optimization of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly as model scaling exacerbates sensitivity to algorithmic imprecision and training instability. Recent advances in optimizers have improved…
Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic…
Modern optimizers, like Muon, impose matrix-wise geometry constraints on their updates. These matrix-wise constraints can be unified under Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) theory. However, all current methods impose fixed LMO geometries for…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…
Prompt optimization has become crucial for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) across a broad range of tasks. Although many research papers demonstrate its effectiveness, practical adoption is hindered because existing…